We’ll find alien life in the next 20 years with our new, awesome telescopes says NASA

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In a public meeting with NASA’s chief, the agency’s top scientists have said that they expect to find alien life within the next 20 years. Unfortunately, for those hoping that Europa or Mars might harbor life, NASA is fairly confident that the discovery of extraterrestrials will probably be outside our Solar System rather than within it. But still, suffice it to say, the discovery of life of any kind outside of Earth’s atmosphere would be massive news. Within 20 years, we could finally find out that we’re not alone in the universe — and, well, that would change everything.

This rather shocking belief — that we will find signs of alien life within 20 years — stems back to the massive success of the Kepler space telescope. Kepler was designed to seek out distant stars with orbiting planets — and that’s exactly what it found, in spades. In just 2014 alone, and while staring at just a tiny patch of night sky, Kepler confirmed the existence of more than 700 new planets. Thanks to Kepler, the astronomy community now thinks that every star is orbited by at least one planet, and probably a lot more than one. When you consider that there are around 300 billion stars in just the Milky Way, and billions of galaxies in the universe, and thus an almost inconceivable number of planets in the universe, it’s easy to see why many scientists believe alien life to be a near certainty.

While Kepler can spot planets that orbit distant stars, it has two limitations. One, it can only spot fairly large planets (much larger than Earth) — and two, it can’t actually tell us what the atmospheric conditions are like on the new planets. While the size of the planet isn’t all that significant (its orbital period and distance from its parent star is more important), being able to analyze the atmosphere is key to discovering whether it harbors life or not (and for discerning habitability, if we want to one day visit or colonize the planet).

Hubble vs. James Webb Space Telescope, primary mirror size. The JWST will be able to gather a LOT of light.

Fortunately, NASA is preparing to launch a couple of new telescopes that will make Hubble and Kepler look like tin toys by comparison. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is essentially an upgraded version of Kepler, will launch in 2017. A year later in 2018, Hubble’s successor — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — will launch as well. Between them, they should be able to find hundreds of thousands of planets, and then “sniff” out the atmospheric conditions using the JWST’s spectrometer to divine whether any alien life has lived or died there.

At the NASA meeting, the agency’s chief Charles Bolden said, “It’s highly improbable in the limitless vastness of the universe that we humans stand alone.” NASA astronomer Kevin Hand went as far as to say, “I think in the next 20 years we will find out we are not alone in the universe.” John Grunsfeld, a veteran astronaut that’s now a NASA science chief, said, “This technology we are using to explore exoplanets is real. The James Webb Space Telescope and the next advances are happening now. These are not dreams – this is what we do at NASA.”

The Milky Way, as seen by NASA’s infrared Spitzer telescope. You can see a lot more stars with an infrared telescope as it cuts through the dust clouds.

Suffice it to say, if JWST can identify signs of life in the atmosphere of a remote planet — methane or some other biological marker perhaps — then everything would change. We would no longer be alone in the universe. We could no longer putter around indefinitely, causing untold damage to Earth’s ecology. If it turns out that much of the universe is already occupied with other life forms, we’d have to actually get a move on and colonize some darn planets.

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Ivor O’Connor

That prompted me to read up on the Marvel Universe. My all time favorite character was Warlock and his future self the Magus who always seemed to be crossing paths with a certain individual from Titan…

bob lebart

“We could no longer putter around indefinitely, causing untold damage to Earth’s ecology.”

Well, I hope so, but I suspect a lot of Earth’s hardcore polluters won’t see any connection between life on other planets and their own personal actions.
Still, can’t wait for TESS and JWST to get out there and start sending back all that cool stuff!

massau

i guess there is one thing that we seem to forget the further away we look the further in the past we look. so a planet that looks like it hasn’t got any intelligent life forms might already have surpassed us in technology in the present.

Avatar1337

So? We are first of all not looking further away with the new telescopes, we are getting better images of the planets we are already looking at. Second of all, why does it matter that they are more advanced than us? It is highly unlikely that if we find life on another planet, that they would be intelligent. If we are searching for planets to colonize then we have to look fairly closely. We still need the new telescopes for that.

massau

i did not say that the telescope would be useless but trying to find planets to colonise isn’t the main purpose for the telescope. because we do not have the techs for travelling light years away and a lot could have changed in the time we travelled to the planet.

i think the only real purpose for this telescope is to find the statistical chance that a planet is habitable and how high the chance of life on the other planets is.

CrustyToenail

I don’t think the “Elite Avatar” understood what you said. He was too busy bursting with indignant angst.
Anyway, yes, our observation of a planet will not necessarily represent the planet as it is today. However, if we discover a planet that harbors life, intelligent or otherwise, it will provide an answer to the singular question that drives us to explore – are we alone out here?
Once we have the answer (hopefully, that we are not), it will spur us forward to explore, colonize, to boldly go, where no man has gone before.

massau

“hopefully, that we are not” i personally think this is a dual sided blade

if we are alone than why is no one out there? but if we are not alone than are those aliens as warmonger as we are should we just be quiet and hope they never see us?

Zakuak

All valid concerns in my opinion. I’d venture to say that if a alien race was in fact intelligent enough to traverse the cosmos that they’d probably gone far beyond the petty and hostile things we on earth like to war about. I’d bet they’d not be to willing to waste energy/resources on a group like us in an armed engagement….when they could simply peacefully pass us by and collect much more resources from any other planet in our solar system as we watched from earth.

All just my wishful thinking of course heh..

massau

evil bored aliens:
i guess it would be more like a human and an ant nest you play with it and look how we react after a while they get bored and leave. but if you where an alien than you would just do it in a subtle way so you wouldn’t get discovered.
good aliens:
they would just watch until we get to a certain technological level and than contact us.

Ivor O’Connor

Not wishful thinking at all. They would not even bother with our solar system and instead collect what they need from another system with no life or life so primitive that it would not notice them. Much in the same way as we avoid causing pain to ourselves.

CrustyToenail

What benefit does humanity derive from being quiet? To live in fear of the consequences of exploration is futile especially since our time is limited, as a species and as individuals. We can’t hide here forever. Eventually, at best, an asteroid will finish us. Plus, everything about aliens is a hypothesis. To explore would be to learn and frankly, life without any learning would not merit the need for a brain such as ours. So why not let ourselves explore. Why not find out what else is possible.

massau

i wouldn’t want an von neuman killing probe knocking at my door. i heard they where worse than those Jehovah witnesses.

ok now for real i think we should be much further evolved before we make any real contact, you never know what is out there.

Ivor O’Connor

We do not have any choice in the matter. We’ve been very noisy these last 100 years and any intelligent beings out there know we are here. They have not come a knocking cause they do not need to nor would they want to.

massau

i think if the signals are 100 light years away that the S/N ratio is far to high to sense it. there are limits on the receivable especially because we do not send optimised signals maybe the aliens have exotic tech that can receive it.

Ivor O’Connor

I’m banking on some intelligent life having much better tech than we have currently. I suspect in another hundred years we’ll have a colony started on mars and perhaps self sustaining robotic factories producing all sorts of things that we can’t even imagine at the moment.

massau

it still doesn’t take away the S/N limit.
but yea a von neuman probe used to colonise the moon mars and terraform venus would probably be done in 50 years creating the robot that is not getting it there. maybe we could even start building a dyson swarm if we have these probes.

Ivor O’Connor

I’m just guessing but there are all sorts of ways to get around the S/N ratio. Look at how we watch stars wobble to find planets. An indirect way aliens might use, that I could understand, would be to log the billions of billions of stars and planets and classify them. A planet over a 200 year period developing more and more chatter would perhaps be an indication of life. Along with a few other indications they’d probably change our classification from “harmless” to “mostly harmless”.

Ivor O’Connor

You wrote another article very similar to this just two months ago but forgot to link to it:

I’m sure the anaerobic bacteria that are the true inhabitants of this planet are rightfully angry about all the oxygen that has damaged this planet’s ecology.

Marco

NASA is starting to sound like a snake-oil salesman with a claim like this. I suppose they feel the absolute need to justify their projects/funding so those don’t get cut. But come on, this one is a real stretch. I don’t care what a mass spectrometer says about an atmosphere, we’re not going to confirm life with just that. There are known natural processes that can create most anything that a mass spec can pic up, and conceivable ones that we haven’t seen on earth (yet) that can account for everything else. The best these scopes could do is tell us which planets would be best candidates to look at more closely one day when we have additional capability.

Now, full disclosure, I’m not a particular fan of long-ball programs for NASA over something that could benefit the species in the next 20-30 years. I think NASA’s goals should revolve around the spheres of 1) our own planet (space elevator, space labs, scientific satellites for earth, etc), 2) within a few lunar distances (the moon, asteroid capture/science, etc), and 3) inner planet region (mars, solar observatories, etc.).

I believe that although companies like SpaceX will be substantially cutting the cost of getting things into orbit, it won’t be until we get a space elevator that we really cut the costs to where we can be effective in getting to and from space. The studies say we don’t quite have the materials for one yet. But in decades past, NASA used go out and spend heavily on research to make things happen. Not just wait around until someone else came up with something that could work for their projects. The $8 billion (minimum) that will be spent on the James Webb telescope would have been much better spent getting us closer to a space elevator faster, in my opinion.

Yes, a space elevator would be a massive project, but nearly as costly as just 1 year of war, or even nearly as much as the US government accidentally sent out to people who should not have received funds last year (over $100 billion). We really need, in my opinion, an all-encompassing, almost obsessive, relatively apolitical, spectacular national goal that can bring our country together, while creating something that will advance us and is useful to us today.

Just my $0.02.

Naum Rusomarov

my 2c.

Every space project takes something like three to four decades from start to finish. James Webb Space Telescope in that sense in not an exception, except maybe with the over expenditures, which is typical for the military projects but not for science projects. I honestly don’t know why that happened with this one. Maybe shit just happens.

Also, you’re mixing up fundamental science projects, e.g., JWST that will fuel the next several decades of real science, versus commercial (spacex) and engineering projects (space elevator, mars missions, etc.). The first is of exceptional value to fundamental sciences such as astronomy, math, and physics, while the latter is more in the engineering and commercial class of projects. Again, I’m not saying that both branches shouldn’t be developed at the same time, but gutting a project like JWST for a space elevator will definitely setback all western (US, Canada, Europe, Japan) science for way more than several decades. That is until the Chinese or someone else launches a similar telescope.

dc

we humans get a lot more benefit from engineering than speculative science. Science should be about making our lives better, not us living for science. I don’t have a problem funding this, but NASA has gotten off track and needs to focus on engineering first and science second.

Naum Rusomarov

“speculative” science has made possible GPS, computers, planes, penicillin, and many other things.

Jeff Vahrenkamp

hum… while I’m not sure there is a hard line defining “speculative” science from engineering, I’d say none of your examples were remotely based on speculation, but on intentional observation and trial and error (which is pretty much what engineering is). By speculative science I’m suspecting DC is talking about things that can only be partially observed and not reproduced under laboratory conditions (super nova, solar system formation, genesis of life). I’m not saying these things can’t be studied, but it’s like the blind men and the elephant, there are so many hidden variables that its’ easy to spend a lot of time studying something in a scientific manner and come to very wrong conclusions. Also not to say important discoveries can’t come from these, but a method where setting can be tweaked and retested produces usually yields more accurate results more quickly.

dc

exactly, things like the airplane weren’t developed in a university physics department. It was developed by putting things together, making observations and seeing what worked. Even GPS was really a big engineering project for the most part. It’s cool to find things in the outer reaches of the galaxy and to speculate about what they might mean (such as gravitational waves which may or probably were not seen), but in terms of what would make life on earth much better, I’d say building a space elevator would be it.

Naum Rusomarov

Do you know that airframe models nowadays are designed on computers and tested using supercomputers? Aircraft computational fluid dynamics simulations are run every time you need to see how the airplane will behave in without building the thing. The simulations use the law of fluid dynamics, which were discovered and studied in the late 19th and 20th century by many scientists. Without it you simply cannot have new and better planes or fly-by-wire. And many other things.

Furthermore, the companies designing and writing that same software do not hire engineers, they hire mathematicians and scientists most often with heavy background and experience in computational methods. Why? Because, those are the same people that pretty much develop the methods.

Ivor O’Connor

Not so true. I know one. PhD in mechanical engineering. Specializes in the above. Uses many many programs usually based in fortran. Still uses wind tunnels from time-to-time.

Naum Rusomarov

Do you know why they still have to use wind tunnel experiments? Ask him that.

Ivor O’Connor

I already have. Because models are only so good.

Naum Rusomarov

You just proved why you need fundamental research.

Ivor O’Connor

:)

Yes we do. *LOTS* more!

Naum Rusomarov

I second that! :D

dc

nope, not if we are calling the space elevator a mere engineer project. By that definition GPS and computers are mere engineering as well. Penicillin was developed through observational science, not speculative. Planes similarly fall into the engineering field. It wasn’t like the Wright brothers were basing their design on some algorithm they learned at their physics class. They were just engineers, or really not even that. Today we would call them mechanics.

Naum Rusomarov

GPS cannot work without knowing the ephemerides of the satellites, from which you calculate their position at any time. To calculate their positions (and ephemerides) you need astronomers, who use standard astronomical measurements, celestial mechanics models and calculus to do that. Engineers don’t do that. Scientists do. The same guys who discover and study the basic laws of nature and further the mathematical tools used in their interpretation.

GPS cannot work without precise atomic time. To know precise time you need to know quantum mechanics, math, and also engineering to build the actual tools. Who do you think created quantum mechanics? Engineers? No. Scientists who worked on fundamental science, which for some reason you call it “speculative”.

When I say that GPS wouldn’t have been built without knowledge gained by fundamental sciences, I mean it.

When I say that future technologies cannot be built without new knowledge gained by fundamental sciences, I mean it.

Also, in my original post, which I’m sure you have read it, I said that the engineering part is also very important. It’s just not the single most important part.

Jeff Vahrenkamp

Just to clarify, when I was talking about speculative science i wasn’t talking about fundamental science. Basic science is about making repeatable observations under controlled conditions. Speculative science is attempting to apply those observations to non-repeatable observations made under uncontrolled conditions. The two are very different.

At the same time, I think you two are pretty much talking about the same thing just from two different angles. Engineering is a combination of basic science and application. In engineering you take knowledge gained from basic science, apply it to a problem, and build a working model (engineering). You then test your model (basic science), and refine it (engineering). Essentially you can’t have an engineer who doesn’t truly do basic science. Though you can have a basic scientist who doesn’t do engineering, though that means they’re not a very good basic scientist, as you should be refining your model and tweaking conditions to confirm your results.

Jeff Vahrenkamp

I definitely agree with your first paragraph, though for future reference they are using a spectrometer, not a mass spectrometer. One measures light intensity/wavelength (spectrometer) which we can measure, one measures the mass of molecules (mass spectrometer) which we can’t measure from distant planets.

Felix

@Marco: “NASA is starting to sound like a snake-oil salesman with a claim like this. I suppose they feel the absolute need to justify their projects/funding so those don’t get cut. But come on, this one is a real stretch.”

Only problem is NASA didn’t say anything. An astronomer who works there said he thinks this will happen, and that’s it. ExtremeTech is the one saying that NASA pretty much promised alien life in two decades. The guy is probably just a passionate worker with faith in what he does, which is good. The title is wrong or misleading and anyone who reads the entire piece will notice.

JWalk

What’s crazy is that people seem to have such an issue over $8 billion in costs for a piece of equipment that will, at minimum, allow us to learn so much about the neighborhood we live in. Contrast that with spending over $1000 billion on a new fighterplane that’s only good at dogfighting other fighterplanes and blowing stuff up.

Marco

It is about being a realist. I did mention that war and gov waste could easily fund this. But the reality is that NASA is going to only get so much funding. So one can only hope for priority change in NASA, as opposed to congress suddenly giving them hundreds of billions to spend. Those who make things actually happen have to live in the real world with real constraints. And in the real world, NASA isn’t going to get a great deal more funding than what they have now, so we have to design around that, just like we design around any other constraint. Too many people seem willing to call for funding or projects that have no realistic chance in this world, due to the political realities.

All that said, NASA can and does try to change that reality. They try to make their projects look sexy and appealing to the masses to put pressure on congress to give them more funding. It has been readily apparent for quite some time now that this is part of their approach. As such, I can think of no NASA project/prospect that could really excite the masses more than a space elevator and all that it would lead to. That would be one possible way to change the reality of funding constraints, even if only slightly.

dc

Honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if there is intelligent life which has already found us, that they did something to block off our ability to find other intelligent life. I know that sounds bizarro, but think about it. If a civilization can find life, they can find tech and tech is the only commodity that a space faring race would likely care about (as resources would be virtually infinite).

Marco

I think we’re also trying to view life too much like our own, and that approaches like this one are far less likely to succeed than many believe, because of that very problem. There are alternative biochemistries that very well could exist (or even be the prevalent biochemistries of life in the universe) out there which we would not know nearly enough about to identify life. Silicon-based life forms, or boron-based, or metal-oxide based, sulfur-based. I mean, really, it seems like most planets we’ve theorized thus far have a better chance of having life based on those other chemistries than on our own. For all we know, we’ve already seen the tell-tale signs of life on other planets and don’t even know it, and probably won’t until we actually visit them.

And as for intelligent life… it is very possible that it has moved past the biochemical into the mechanical realm. Just think about us. Is it not possible that in a few hundred or a few thousand years we will be able to place a person’s consciousness completely into a machine, and thus that person would never really die, but continue so long as it can be repaired/backed up? A few thousand years of human history from the first written language to sentient mechs is not very long at all. Just a tiny fraction of the time the sun will be in its main sequence stage. Moving ourselves to robotic life forms with almost endless lives could very well be the next natural step. We could even end up desiring collective group minds (think borg, but without the biologicals, and probably much smaller), who knows.

So for us to hope that this project will find any real evidence of life in the universe, I believe, is a real long-shot, and a great self-deception. I believe our future is in the stars, maybe as robotic life forms, but the more of our research funds we spend on projects that over-reach, the longer it will take us to get there, and the more likely we are to kill ourselves off (or be subject to outside extinction) before we can get there.

dc

On the one hand, I completely agree with you. There could be, probably even is, life out there which is totally different from us and which would not necessarily even be cognizant of us.

On the other hand, look at divergent evolution. Take the Hyena and the dog. Totally different species and totally different evolution trees, but they look similar. Of course they exist on the same planet, same atmosphere etc…. But still in the vastness of the universe, I’d bet there are species out there pretty darn similar to us.

Ivor O’Connor

“Silicon-based life forms, or boron-based, or metal-oxide based, sulfur-based.”

The part of me extending into this dimension would be photon based with quantum synapses.

Michelle Williams

Doesn’t sound bizarro to me. Who’s to say Aliens, and I don’t mean ET or War of The Worlds or Independence Day. That some life form out there discovered our Planet like we’re talking about, and perhaps that life form needed to create habitable environments for whatever reasons and either terraformed the Earth or put in place all the biochemical elements needed to terraform a planet perhaps from a great distance. Sounds as plausible as anything else.

VirtualMark

It’s a very bold claim to say we’ll find alien life in 20 years. We don’t yet know the odds of finding it. Sure, the telescopes will improve our chances, but it’s still the unknown.

Still, we live in a very interesting time, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what these telescopes find.

Felix

What the title says: We’ll find alien life in the next 20 years with our new, awesome telescopes says NASA

What really happened: astronomer Kevin Hand said “I think in the next 20 years we will find out we are not alone in the universe.”

The guy does work for NASA, but still…

Martin Dluhoš

This is ridiculous. In Bible is clearly stated that life comes from God and is only possible on Earth. No telescope can disprove this scientific fact !!! What a waste of money. They should rather give all the money to Vatican.

Ulrich Werner

I smell a troll.

Michael Scoffield

You should have smelled sarcasm.

dc

they would be better off giving the money to me. I’m not God but I can put the money to good use.

Tune My Heart Lord Jesus

Quote verse then, mocker.

Martin Dluhoš

It think, it will be slightly hard to explain if the alien home planet week has 6 days, how to rest on the 7th day ?

Or you mean, Adam and Eve had also alien babies they forgot to mention in the Bible ?

Or …

But I am sure the church will find an explanation. Something around the right context how to read it.

Flash Ray Laser

Exactly how the hell is it that you’re referring to something in the
Bible as a scientific fact? Even if you personally believe the words,
they’re not considered scientific facts. That said, did you hear the
news? Turns out, religion is bullshit. Who knew? I mean it’s not like it
was blazingly obvious that a book about talking snakes and fire bushes
with literally thousands of contradictions was little more than mythology. Oh, wait; it was. What’s completely ridiculous is that it’s 2014 and there are still people
trusting archaic legends about magic and sky gods (which has been
essentially completely debunked by science and actual observation time
and time again) over the very real science that created computers and
put their kind on our moon. Of all the unthinkably probable
extraterrestrial life teeming in the universe, I would imagine the
intelligences advanced enough to have cataloged us and to observe us
from afar would feel that humans were suffering of a mental illness
collectively. They would see that our fear of death and longing for
eternal life was so strong that the same species that knew how to visit
its moon also seemingly turned a deaf ear to logic in this one specific
case so as to hold on to the childish beliefs which comforted them. If
you really want to live forever, it’s probably best you put religion
down so that science (which could cure aging) can finally be free of its
longtime enemy.

Michael Scoffield

Why don’t they spend more time working on a warp drive? That would be a jump in space exploration progress bigger than confirming that 1000 planets are habitable.

Daniel Revas

O.K., so we find them, do we want them to find us? :)

Tune My Heart Lord Jesus

They are going to see more stars, so can we put away the “aliens have to be out there because we think they are” nonsense. Want to see interesting new life forms? turn the telescope the other way.

eonvee375

I like the optimism! But 20 years? Im sure there will be a lots of new thrilling discoveries with the new telescope but 20years?

Zunalter

Inane article…a methane atmosphere does not an extraterrestrial make.

Plus, who doesn’t love the grandiose claims NASA makes all the time in order to continue getting funding. If only to continue to justify their existence, they will definitely find “evidence” of life elsewhere in the universe before their 20 year prediction expires.

Ivor O’Connor

So if they do not find alien life in 20 years will they refund our money? It seems we need some performance based contracts. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary penalties!

http://www.korioi.net/ Korios

“We would no longer be alone in the universe. We could no longer putter around indefinitely, causing untold damage to Earth’s ecology. “

That is a very bold presumption, and you did not even refer to intelligent life. What makes you think that man would change if it was proven that we are not alone? What if microbial life is discovered? How would that change anything?

I3VI5

It doesn’t matter if we are able to talk to them or not. The mere fact that we are not alone in the universe will profoundly change humanity. It’s not that easy to realize this because we are constantly bombarded with the concept of aliens (Hollywood), but there’s a big difference between thinking that we are probably not alone, and KNOWING that we are not alone. It’s a huge philosophical realization.

Ivor O’Connor

Give me the money and I’ll find an honest politician.

garyoptica

..If you found strange marked
out cubic plots of land in Hellas Planita as I did that even include a
semi-circular object buried with four compartments and a slide of plots that
lead up to it with a debris pile as if some ancient bull dozer had been at
work, would you not conclude that you had found evidence already.My work has
been published and I have had over 20,000 hits from various media sites but I
have not managed to get in contact with NASA so far.For now you can all enjoy
this discovery by googling “Quadrata Martis” or use this link which
has coloured points of interest that you can zoom into >> http://gigapan.com/gigapans/153685

Frank Wolf

Just a single JWST will be ok…if barely so. Come on guys, what’s really needed is several orders of magnitude more telescopes, a hundred or a thousand, and with larger mirror clusters, or clusters of the JWST cluster, then launch them into geosynchronous orbit spaced equidistantly around Earth. This should provide ~50,000 mile aperture. Now that’s serious science…and such could nicely keep employed most all the current military industrial workers, retooling arms factories into the manufacturers of the scopes’ components, and support-launch vehicles.

Vision folks, VISION…really think not outside the box here, but outside the atmosphere!

James Earl Adams III

I don’t think we’ll find anything definitive in the next 20 years. You can make appeals to the inconceivable number of planets in the universe on which life may have resided, but you’re not surveying the universe; you’re surveying VISIBLE stars in ONE galaxy at ONE point in time. Meanwhile, your only indicator for life is what’s in the atmosphere, which is useless because you don’t KNOW what extraterrestrial life would or wouldn’t put into the atmosphere, and you can’t rule out geological sources. Your assumptions are based on terrestrial life; the satellites could be staring at the most vibrantly living planets in the galaxy, and no one would know.

Your odds of finding anything definitive or even suggestive are slim to none within this timeframe.

I’ve been reading an interesting book, “Alone in the Universe,” by science writer John Gribbin. It explores the hypothesis that advanced life forms in the universe may be extremely rare (as opposed to simpler life forms such as bacteria), for a number of reasons, and it offers the possibility that there may not be enough sufficiently advanced civilizations to be found. The book also points out that it would be useful to deploy a space telescope beyond Jupiter, as it would be able to better detect infrared signals from exoplanets that provide evidence for the conditions that could support life; these infrared signals are currently drowned out by other infrared radiation in the inner solar system.

Zanpher

According to all the news sites last week (except this one apparently), we have already found them. NASA seems to be VERY behind.

http://www.50cycles.com/blog 50cycles Electric Bikes

I want to see the lights of an alien city before I die.

delray

Just what we need – more illegal aliens; don’t we have enough?

richard

I have never understood why finding something which is obviously there would be so shocking to anyone with an IQ of say a gnat. To think the Earth is the only place in the ENTIRE MULTIVERSE that life exist is so egocentric and ridiculous it is pathetic. Only an idiot who believes in God would believe that no other life is in our Universe much less the multitude of Universes besides ours. There are as many Universes as there are stars. WAKE UP!

stjones911

I know there are unicorns out there; we just haven’t found them yet. But I’m certain we will find one in the next 20 years. NASA has traded science and engineering for wishful thinking and science fiction. There may well be other life in our universe (the only one for which there is any known empirical evidence), but there’s no scientific basis for such certainty. It’s interesting that someone who derides “an idiot who believes in God” claims to know for certain – based on no evidence whatsoever – that something (extraterrestrial life, multiple universes, unicorns) “is obviously there”. Sounds like religious belief to me – or the IQ of, say, an amoeba.

richard

Ignorance is bliss. Do some basic research on what almost every nation is starting to release. Even the Canadian Defense Minister has acknowledged contact. There are structures on the moon. I guess Columbus veered off course and established a colony for Spain there. VIVA ESPANIA!

stjones911

Ah, this guy is your evidence: “Former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer, 90, declared on Russian TV on Saturday that there are 80 different species of aliens.” All is explained. Thanks.

Zanpher

Way to not let facts get in your way … LOL talking about an IQ of a gnat …

Gil Carlson

“The Reagan Briefing on Roswell” Now they can no longer deny the truth of Roswell! This amazing Transcript of classified tape recording made at Camp David, Maryland during a presidential briefing regarding the subject of UFOs and ALIEN VISITATION of EARTH!http://www.blue-planet-project.com/Reagan-Roswell-UFO.html

Bocephus Palin Bundy

That aint right, it done by a bunch of gerd durn nonsense, the earth was created 6,000 years ago, Ken Ham done told me, you gerd durn libtards with your communist hocus pokus and “Scyunce” aint foolin me!

garyoptica

.Hi yes I have many great items that I have found as I sifted through masses of imagery trying to avoid the poorly observed representations and opting for the most significant anomalies and you can find them all here on gigapan on my accounts listing for the user known as marsoptica. Their are 3 pages of listings and the third page is curiosity images that are very unusual and well worth inspecting >> http://gigapan2.gc.cs.cmu.edu/gigapans?query=marsoptica

Colin Taylor

nasa talk bull shit,they know aliens are here and have been for a long time

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